


all our memories (they're haunted)

by deanssammy (babylxxrry)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Depression, Gen, Post-Episode: s03e02 The Sign of Three, possibly, the other two are mentioned in passing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-18
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-06-12 09:25:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15336828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/babylxxrry/pseuds/deanssammy
Summary: if you’re feeling desperately sad this summer, wait until it gets dark and half quiet and then open a window. cool air and passing cars are gonna heal your heart. i promise.sherlock thinks.(post-tsot character study)





	all our memories (they're haunted)

**Author's Note:**

> hello yes i finally had enough inspiration to scrape this together. idk how good it really is but i'm just glad to have something done.

_if you’re feeling desperately sad this summer, wait until it gets dark and half quiet and then open a window. cool air and passing cars are gonna heal your heart. i promise._

He doesn’t know why he thinks following the advice of a random blog is going to make any difference in how he feels, but he thinks he’s really hit rock bottom this time. It’s not one of his usual moods. He’s not particularly bored or anything. It’s just that he feels aimless, untethered to the earth and hence, left behind as it spins slow and steady. He feels like he’s watching himself pace the flat, like he’s not even inhabiting his own body anymore, and it’s just the tiniest bit frightening. He doesn’t think he’s ever gotten this far. He knows what’s caused it, of course, but acknowledging it would be acknowledging his own feelings, and that’s not something he’s willing to broach at the moment.

He doesn’t quite feel _sad_ , not in the traditional sense, but he supposes he could fit _sad_ into his chest, if he wanted to. No, he’s not sad. He feels more lost than anything. And the thing is, he doesn’t even understand why. Before… well, before all of _this_ , he’d been alone. Alone and  content. Drugged up, perhaps, and locked away in a rehab center, but he’d been okay alone. When did his life’s purpose come to be guided by a single other person?

He sighs and pushes open the window. It’s almost fall, and the breeze is cool tonight. He takes a deep breath before he sits heavily on the edge of his bed. It’s dark in the flat, a solitary light turned on in the stairwell in case he needs to dash somewhere, but here in his room, the moon provides the only illumination. The quietness is practically deafening. There’s no ongoing experiment, no kettle or telly or slow key-clicks. It’s just him, the gently familiar creaking of the building in the night, and the occasional car on the street below. Even his mind is quiet for once, and he’s doing his best to keep it that way, because once he lets himself come back, he’ll lose it all. He’ll lose this most recent chapter of his life to his own deductions and analyses. God forbid his brother ever hear his thoughts, but he’ll lose the memories and the emotions attached to them. He’ll categorize everything into the depths of his mind palace and he doesn’t want that, not for the things he’s clinging so desperately onto right now.

_Brilliant. Amazing. Extraordinary._

He doesn’t want them to just become words on a shelf. He doesn’t want to break them down to mere phrases, pieces of dialogue spoken and lost, but he knows he will if he lets himself come back.

So he doesn’t. He sits by the window and listens to the wind and the cars and the sounds inherent to a never-sleeping city.

He wonders if John’s sitting awake, too. But no, that’d be stupid. It’s close to four in the morning. There’s no reason for him to be awake now. He always kept a fairly consistent schedule when he was here at 221B.

Sherlock stands again, pacing circles around his room. He thinks back to yellow walls and paper-thin blades and speeches and playing the waltz. That’s where it all went wrong, he supposes. He shouldn’t be saying supposes, but it feels less… final than _knows._ He supposes that’s where it all disintegrated. For him, that is. If conventional views of marriage are anything to go by, that’s where everything suddenly slotted into place for John, and he can’t deny there’s an ache just behind his sternum at that thought.

He vaguely remembers the lead-up to it, knows he has most of it stored away somewhere, but he’s not too inclined to dig it up now, not when he’s still trying to cling to the shreds of _brilliantamazingextraordinary_ and everything attached to those small words. He remembers looking forward to the dancing.

_The only thing you’d been looking forward to,_ his mind helpfully fills in, and he flinches. He knows. He doesn’t want to know.

_< Delete>_

Only he can’t. He can’t delete it because it’s tied to so many other memories pertaining to the wedding. He sighs and tries to pull up the memory of the actual dancing. He realizes a beat too late that he doesn’t actually _have_ any, because he didn’t get to dance.

He closes his eyes and ignores the psychosomatic ache in his chest as he reaches back to that night. He runs his fingertips over the memory. He’d felt like a hole had slowly bloomed in his chest that day, starting in the morning and all the way through to the reception. He’d only just managed to play the waltz without completely losing himself. He’d wanted to stay and dance and congratulate John and get absolutely wasted so he wouldn’t have to remember, but his feet had carried him away, away, away. He’d ended up back here, throwing up what little he’d eaten and swallowing down tears in place of food.

A moment of weakness, he acknowledges. A one-off, so to speak, except it hadn’t been. He hadn’t slept for six and a half nights after, mind alternating between absolute chaos and perfect silence in hour-long rotations. Pure exhaustion had knocked him out for three hours before he’d been awoken by a chaos phase. At least those two had subdued into the quiet hum of blankness that occupied his mind now. He still hasn’t made an effort to sleep much more than two hours a night, or whatever happens to be necessary to keep himself functioning at a minimum level.

A gust of wind through his window chills him out of his thoughts and he closes the window, drawing the curtains. He lies down on top of his duvet and closes his eyes, digging back to his earliest memories of John. For some reason he refuses to think about, he consistently falls asleep faster when he’s thinking of John.

It does nothing to stop his chest from aching, though.

 

-fin. 

**Author's Note:**

> leave a comment or kudos if you, too, had major feelings about how fucking LOST sherlock looked at the wedding reception.


End file.
